Create a Power BI Dashboard from PDF files
How To Create a Power BI Dashboard using PDF Files as a Source
Although Power BI offers hundreds of options as a source of data to build a dashboard, the most widely used type of source is Excel files or some sort of direct connection to your own database.
Have you ever thought of being able to extract the data from a PDF file and be able to use it as a source? If yes (or no, I don’t care), this is exactly what we will be explaining today.
As you can see from the screenshot above, PDF is one of the options to choose as a source for your dashboard. I went ahead and created a PDF file as a sample for this quick tutorial, which contains a basic explanation of the data table that we will use and monthly sales. The reason for adding those two paragraphs with text is simply because I wanted to show you that Power BI will still be able to detect the data table and it will be able to extract just that and ignore the rest.
How do I do that?
Go to Power BI and then click Get data. From the options available, select PDF and then select the PDF file you want to import.
In my case, it was the file I created ‘sales_pdf’. Once you import it, it will give you the option to Load or Transform Data before you load it. As you can see below in the right side for Display Options, we have Table001 and Page001. Please note, I have selected Page001 initially just to explain you what happens. If you select Page001, then Power BI will understand that you are trying to import the entire content from the PDF file.
In our case, that is not what we are trying to do. We are trying to extract only the data from the table that contains monthly sales and costs. In order to be able to do that, make sure you select Table001. After you select Table option, Power BI will figure out where the table is and import only the table data.
Click Load and voilà, your data table is loaded in Power BI and ready to create your dashboard.
Although this example seems very simple in nature, you can leverage on this and come up with ideas on how to apply on your daily job. Let’s say you have hundreds of separate PDF files that have the same data structure and you want to import all of them at the same time and combine the data. Luckily, Power BI can manage all of that, from importing data from folders to combining all those files with the same data table structure.
If you are new to creating Power BI dashboards, here is a quick tutorial on how to do that.
Create Your First Report in Power BI
Cheers!
